Aidan Quinn, Annette Bening, Dennis Boutsikaris

Anyone who has seen and loved Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves should feel right at home in his off-beat psychological thriller In Dreams. A sexy, very adult take on "Little Red Rid...( read more  read more... )ing Hood," Wolves unreeled as a series of surreal "fairy tales" interwoven within the heated dreams of a young girl verging on womanhood. Wolves' patron saints were Freud and Jung (as sifted through Jordan's wickedly fertile imagination), and the duo are very much aboard for In Dreams as well. Here's a movie that takes place entirely in dreamtime, where the dark, violent fantasies of Claire Cooper (Annette Bening)--wife, mother, and illustrator of children's books--play out unpoliced by superego, conscience, or society. On the face of it, Claire's a clairvoyant whose mind becomes more and more possessed by child-killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.). Cops and shrinks refuse to take her seriously until she loses her own daughter and much, much more. Tapping into weird images of her soulmate's childhood, when he was abused by a hateful mother in a house now submerged in a nearby reservoir, Claire comes closer and closer to her gender-shifting bad boy (and his latest victim). From start to finish, In Dreams dwells in hyperreality. Whether leeched of or drenched in color, slipping eerily through an underwater world, rushing madly toward catastrophe--every hallucinatory shot is saturated with menace. It's the kind of potent, unresolved menace that haunts your waking day after a particularly unsettling nightmare. Watch this gorgeous film as therapeutic (?) theater inside Claire's mind, where she and her murderous doppelganger act out a terrible Oedipal drama driven by sex and jealousy. Bening and Downey deliver superb, risky performances, and Darius Khondji's cinematography, with almost every frame punctuated by blood-reds, is sensuously dreamlike. In Dreams is one of those great, flawed films that reaches for more than it ultimately achieves. But what a welcome change from the dullness and shallowness of the formulaic sure things that dominate movie screens as the 20th century draws to a close. --Kathleen Murphy

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48% liked it

6,964 ratings

Critics

22% liked it

49 critics

R, 1 hr. 45 min.

Directed by: Neil Jordan

Release Date: June 1, 1998

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DVD Release Date: August 29, 2000

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Flixster Reviews (301)


  • September 24, 2009
    Beautifully shot but it all gets a little too weird towards the end!
  • December 28, 2008
    Didn't get me the way I thought it would. Some nice sequences, but overall, meh.
  • May 5, 2008
    Claire Cooper (Annette Bening)--wife, mother, and illustrator of children's books--play out unpoliced by superego, conscience, or society. On the face of it, Claire's a clairvoyant whose mind becomes more and more possessed by child-killer Vivian Thompson (Robert Downey Jr.). Cop...( read more)s and shrinks refuse to take her seriously until she loses her own daughter and much, much more. Tapping into weird images of her soulmate's childhood, when he was abused by a hateful mother in a house now submerged in a nearby reservoir, Claire comes closer and closer to her gender-shifting bad boy (and his latest victim). From start to finish, In Dreams dwells in hyperreality. Whether leeched of or drenched in color, slipping eerily through an underwater world, rushing madly toward catastrophe--every hallucinatory shot is saturated with menace. It's the kind of potent, unresolved menace that haunts your waking day after a particularly unsettling nightmare. Annette Bening is a talent, I could not empathize with her character at all. Despite all the catastrophes surrounding her life, she is more concerned with exorcising her own demons than in mourning the loss of loved ones. I understnad that he is in her mind and it's making her think differently, but there was not much of a reaction from her when they found her daughter dead. Robert Downey Jr., creepy as ever, was amazing as Vivian, was quite disturbing. The imagering of the New England was beutiful, but thats about all the movie had going for it. I would recommand watching Ghost Whispher or Medium.
  • April 4, 2008
    This really was a film of two parts for me, I felt through most of the film the frustration that the character played by Annette Benning was under and thought she did a convincing job. The storyline up until the point when Robert Downey Jr came in was pretty entertaining and unu...( read more)sual, however, I felt the character played by Downey Jr was pretty over exagerated in perfromance and not very believable, so much so this film was heading for 4 stars but took a turn.
  • July 16, 2009
    This is one gorgeous film (the submerged town, the play, the cider factory) , and Jordan is evidently a brilliant director. Sadly the plot comes straight out of some Dark Castle produced b-movie nonsense about missing children and people thinking you're crazy - and the acting is ...( read more)nothing special. Turn the sound off and it's far better.
  • July 10, 2009
    Horrible movie, RDJ is insanely funny!
  • June 6, 2009
    Bizarre, disturbing movie. Definitely worth checking out.
  • April 14, 2009
    Kinda of dumb but ok
  • April 12, 2009
    I saw some of this on tv, so yes some of it was was all i saw, they really cut a movie up to make it fit for the time slots. I woujld like to rent this and watch the whole thing, I also missed the beginning of the movie, will get back to u on this one
  • April 11, 2009
    This was on tv and even though I saw it back in '98 I didn't remember much about it, except that I wasn't crazy about it. Being the RDJ and Neil Jordan fan that I am, I figured I'd give it another try.
    Well, now I can see why it was forgettable. It has many great things going ...( read more)for it but it falls short. Too bad. Downey was the best thing but his character isn't revealed until the last quarter. I don't dislike Bening but someone different may have made the film work.

Critic Reviews


January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The silliest thriller in many a moon! full review

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